Westbrook, Fiona2024-05-282024-05-282024-04-19Educational Philosophy and Theory, ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print); 1469-5812 (Online), Informa UK Limited, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1-14. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2024.23360230013-18571469-5812http://hdl.handle.net/10292/17606This paper employs Mikhail Bakhtin for a dialogic reading of dialectics, conceptualising how early childhood education (ECE) teachers’ political dialogues are opened up and closed down. Explorations of ‘political dialogue’, or how teachers respond to issues they deem of political concern, is pertinent for teaching’s inherently political nature. How such encounters are opened and closed has special significance for ECE teachers, who have expressed feeling professionally and politically silenced. Guided by a philosophical framing of the contradictions and jostling interplays between dialogism’s in-betweenness and dialectic’s one-ness, excerpts are analysed from a doctoral study involving 10 Victorian, Australian ECE teachers. This framing and analysis signal the potential ramifications of a dialectical closing down of ECE teachers’ political dialogues in addition to how dialogism’s in-betweenness fosters openness. Contemplating these language strategies, the paper highlights how a silencing divisiveness may transpire, prompting a need for genuine listening in the threshold in-between the self and other.© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/3901 Curriculum and Pedagogy3903 Education Systems39 Education4 Quality Education1303 Specialist Studies in Education1702 Cognitive Sciences2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields3902 Education policy, sociology and philosophy3903 Education systems5002 History and philosophy of specific fieldsJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.1080/00131857.2024.2336023